Knight Ridder Newspapers

DETROIT – Let’s see. Hillary says she isn’t running for president in 2004 and has no intentions of running for president in 2008. She’s forgiven Bill and hopes they’ll grow old together.

That was the big news from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s sit-down with Barbara Walters on ABC Sunday night.

If Clinton isn’t running for president, then why the interview? The junior senator from New York has a book, “Living History,” her memoir of her eight years in the White House as first lady. Simon & Schuster paid $8 million for it and printed a million copies. It’s on sale Monday.

The political news led Sunday night’s interview. It was the sex stuff – how Clinton forgave her husband for lying about his dalliance with former intern Monica Lewinsky – that Walters saved for the end, teasing viewers through commercial break after commercial break.

“Ultimately, I had to get on my knees and I had to pray,” Clinton, a lifelong Methodist, told Walters. Marriage counseling helped, too, she said.

She decided to forgive former President Bill Clinton for his “sin of weakness,” she said, because the alternative would have been to have “no marriage.”

Did she consider a separation? Walters had asked earlier.

“Certainly that crossed my mind,” Clinton answered.

Most of the interview took place in the Clintons’ cream-and-gold family room at their estate in Chappaqua, N.Y. Walters and Clinton also strolled through Park Ridge, Ill., the tony suburb of Chicago where Clinton grew up.

Clinton seemed most relaxed, though, in a short segment taped in front of the Capitol, in which Walters asked about her political aspirations. Would Clinton run for president, Walters asked, if Democratic Party leaders begged her to?

Clinton said she would tell party leaders to “take a deep breath, take two aspirins” and find someone else. But it’s flattering to be considered, she said.

An interview with Walters is hardly a grilling, and Walters seemed eager to flatter Clinton. After the segment in which Clinton said she had no intention of running in 2008, Walters said, instead, that Clinton wouldn’t rule it out.

Walters’ spin could just be juicy television. The timing of the marriage revelations – which Walters called “the big question” – was more juicy television.

So, here’s the juice:

“He looked like a Viking,” Hillary said of Bill, when she first saw him at Yale Law School. She fell in love right away. She was “besotted.” And, she thinks his hands are beautiful.

He asked her to marry him for two years before she accepted. She didn’t want “to follow in his wake,” but eventually decided to follow her heart and go home with him to Arkansas.

They try to be together as much as possible in Chappaqua, and Bill does come to the townhouse they own in Washington.

She believed Bill when he told her he had not had an affair with Gennifer Flowers, but refused to say how she reconciled it with his later testimony under oath that he had.

She never believed Paula Jones’ accusation that President Clinton had made sexual advances to her.

And Monica Lewinsky? Hillary said she had believed Bill’s denials, even when more evidence began to come forward. “I didn’t think it added up to a lot,” she said.

But when President Clinton finally confessed that he had lied, she wanted to wring his neck.

That last part had leaked last week, when Associated Press reporters in Washington got a copy of “Living History,” sending Simon & Schuster scrambling to save its publicity campaign.

To give perspective on how big a gamble a million-book printing is, only about 10 books of the more than 100,000 books published each year in the United States sell a million copies. John Grisham sells 2.6 million; former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, 800,000.

Clinton blamed her husband’s political problems – which included impeachment – on an “out of control, zealous prosecutor.” That would be Kenneth Starr, who looked into the Clintons’ real estate dealings and the Paula Jones incident, among other things.

“Everything that was thrown at us, everything that was said, turned out to be without basis in fact,” said Clinton. Walters asked her whether she still believed there was “a vast right-wing conspiracy” out to get her or her husband.

She said she’d call it “a well-financed right-wing network” – it’s too open to be a conspiracy, she said – that was after Clinton’s presidency from the beginning.

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(c) 2003, Detroit Free Press.

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Hillary Clinton

AP-NY-06-08-03 2246EDT

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